Universal remote controls and other advanced remote controls are designed for communicating with a variety of devices, including televisions, satellite and cable receivers, digital video recorders (DVRs), digital video disk (DVD) players, stereo systems and the like. To facilitate communication with these various devices, the remote controls may store various settings, including the address of the remote, databases of key codes for each of the controlled devices, learned remote codes and various user settings. The various settings are typically stored in non-volatile memory (NVM) within the remote control, and are loaded into random access memory (RAM) and utilized by a processor during operation of the remote control. Occasionally, problems may arise while reading or writing data from the RAM and/or the NVM due to electrostatic discharge (ESD), component failures, software bugs and the like. Thus, the remote control may become unable to remotely operate the controlled devices.
Remote communication problems are frustrating for users because they are often unable to detect the source of the problem. To remedy the problem, the user may call a customer service representative (CSR) who then attempts to identify the source of the problem based on information provided by a user. However, the customer service representative (CSR) may not have adequate information to determine the source of the problem, and thus may be unable to correctly remedy the problem for the user.